Now in its second year, StormBreakers sees several bands perform live in front of a crowd and panel of judges at Bathgate’s Dreadnought Rock to secure a place at this year’s Winter Storm in November, following in the footsteps of last year’s inaugural winners Anchor Lane. With the running order not revealed until the night itself, we’re bringing you interviews from all the bands set to take the stage to give you a hint of what to expect on the night. If you’re planning on attending StormBreakers, we hope you make a new discovery or two, even if they don’t take home the coveted prize.
This time around, we’ve got one of the furthest travelling bands for the event, Everyday Heroes, answering the latest variation of our #RoadTo… questions.
Everyday Heroes
Simple things first – where are you guys from?
We’re all from the valleys just outside of Newport in South Wales.
How long have you been playing together as a band?
This line up has been going around 3 years, but Jay and Luke have been playing together a lot longer. It’s the classic story really, it started as a band in school that was lucky enough to survive the transition into adult life.
Where does the name of the band come from?
I wish I had an exciting story for you, but I think “Everyday Hero” was one of Luke’s friends’ name’s on Xbox Live when we were all still in school. Naming your band is one of the hardest things to do when you’re just starting out so you can look in some really unusual places for inspiration. We’ve have toyed with the idea of a name change during our career but it’s just so embedded with us and the scene in Wales now we wouldn’t dream of it.
Describe your music. What makes you unique?
We tend to default to saying we a play a blend of blues/Southern rock adapted to a more modern hard rock sound, but honestly our influences across all four members are so diverse that some really interesting ideas do bleed into the creative process and inform our work. While we definitely have a core sound that should be recognisable and accessible for all fans of rock, between the four of us we are always pushing to find unique and interesting ways to keep the songs fresh and original.
What’s your live show like? How are you hoping to impress the judges?
I think the key to playing live is recognising it’s not enough to play your songs, you have to perform your songs, and it’s something over our career we have developed and improved by being honest with each other about what we could be doing better. The biggest take away we get from fans after our shows is how musically tight the performances are, and how impressed they are with Luke’s voice so the Dreadnought crowd can look forward to that. But most importantly we want to have fun showcasing our songs and really want the audience to be an intimate part of that experience, we’ll never force it, if the audience wants to enjoy the show from down the front or at the bar we’ll play our hearts out regardless.
Have you been to Winter Storm before?
This will actually be our first time in Scotland period so we’re beyond excited, but we’ve known about the festival for a while and the lineup always looks killer! A lot of the bands that have played past years we’ve shared the stage with elsewhere so we know the quality of artists that have graced the Winter Storm stage. If we were to add our name to that poster, we’d consider it a great honour.
How/when did you find out that you’d be playing StormBreakers?
We responded to a Facebook advertisement looking for bands to compete by sending in our EPK. Opportunities like this are too good to not make the effort, I think this was around April. After a little bit of a wait and discussion over the finer details with the organiser we got confirmation we were on the bill around the start of June.
What sort of setlist can we expect?
With a shorter set there’s no room for us to drop the ball, we’ll be bringing a relentless mix of what we consider best showcases the breadth of our catalogue while keeping the energy high and crowd engaged. It’ll mostly comprise of songs from across both our EPs but expect to hear some unreleased material as well.
Other than yourselves, who are you most looking forward to watch perform at StormBreakers?
All the bands honestly. These kind of competitions can bring out the best in a lot of artists so it’ll be great to meet some new bands on the UK circuit and see them on their A-game. We have actually shared the stage with Scarlett Rebels a couple of times so it’ll be good to catch up with those boys.
What’s been the highlight of the band’s career so far?
We’ve been fortunate enough to be afforded some really amazing opportunities in the last couple of years. One of the standouts was opening Steelhouse Festival in 2016, the same weekend as rock icons like Thunder, The Darkness, The Answer and Terrorvision to name a few. Knowing you shared a stage of that calibre with such great artists gave us a taste of what we can achieve as a band and we’ve been insatiably hungry to showcase ourselves ever since. Also seeing Chris Robertson of Black Stone Cherry wear our band shirt across a string of US tour dates last year was pretty surreal.
What’s the wildest thing you’ve seen or done at a live show?
We try and remain professional at all our live shows, to be honest. The promoters, organisers and everyone behind the scenes work too hard to have the bands come in and ruin it. But I realise that’s not a rock and roll answer so the thing that springs to mind is the time Lewis, our bassist, sank a few too many Newcastle Browns before a show. He went on to sing every word of the set in what we’ll call “experimental keys” despite our desperate requests for him to stop. We thought the gig went horribly but lo and behold a few days later, a review of the show was published claiming Lewis’ stage presence was a revelation and he was one of the best bassists the reviewer had ever seen. We’ve been drinking Newcastle Brown ever since.
What are you working on at the moment/your plans for the rest of the year?
We very recently finished writing our debut album and have made a start on the recording process. We’re taking our time to make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be at this point in our career but hoping to have some new music out before the end of the year, in some capacity. As for plans to see out the year, we’re spreading our wings a little and playing some killer shows across the country, we hit London for the first time in October, we have Hard Rock Hell in North Wales shortly after as well as some real cool shows closer to home. We love to gig and our mission going into 2019 is to take our music to the corners of the country that may not have discovered us yet.
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